“Yes” is the likely answer, if you’re not also using a third-party archive to retain, search and retrieve emails and attachments.

There’s no doubt about the success of Office 365; it’s a popular cloud productivity suite used by businesses around the world. But limitations with the native archiving and eDiscovery offerings of Office 365 have the potential to substantially skyrocket business risks and costs related to day-to-day operations, compliance and lawsuits.

By complementing Office 365 with a third-party email archiving solution in the cloud, you better support compliance, discovery, business continuity and cost savings.

Protect your business against intellectual property loss when employees leave the company. Limit your financial exposure when you get audited or sued. Don’t miss out on all the business benefits of a third-party archive with Office 365.

Cut your compliance and eDiscovery costsEvery business needs to worry about data storage and handling related to potential lawsuits. Businesses in regulated industries must also comply with numerous additional data-retention regulations that seem to be constantly changing and ever increasing.

When your company is sued or audited, it costs time and money. The more time IT and legal teams spend searching for what they need, the more money it costs your business.

Responding to an audit or discovery request quickly saves your business money! With a third-party email archiving solution designed specifically to support these efforts, auditors and legal teams locate and organize data much more quickly than with traditional (and now outdated) methods, significantly reducing the billable hours spent on every demand for data.

Get the security and peace of mind that comes with knowing every inbound and outbound email and file attachment is being automatically preserved in a third-party archive using unalterable, WORM-compliant storage.

A third-party archive with robust and powerful search capabilities enables legal and compliance users to organize relevant results with tagging features and customizable hold reasons and export them in a variety of flexible file formats for review. The less time spent searching for, organizing and exporting relevant information for an audit or legal review, the less it costs your business.

Protect critical data and business continuityEmail is critical to the communications and operations of your business. To protect critical business data and business continuity, you should create a plan to protect the emails and attachments sent and received by every employee.

What happens if you accidentally delete an important email message? What if an employee trashes their entire email box before leaving for a new job? Do you just lose that valuable data and history, with no way to retrieve it?

With a third-party archive, you automatically preserve every sent and received message and attachment in a format that cannot be deleted or modified. In other words, you’ll never lose access to any critical information and you’ll always be able carry on with business as usual after an employee departs, regardless of the circumstances.

(Without an archive, even if your employee doesn’t delete their data on the way out the door, you’ll have to continue to pay for their Office 365 seat in perpetuity, if you want to maintain access to the contents of that mailbox.)

Founded in 2007, Sonian is the only pure public cloud information archiving company, providing services that are easy, flexible, actionable and reliable for OEM partners and their end customers. Sonian allows companies to preserve, analyze and access their electronic communications for legal, regulatory and continuity purposes while gaining organizational insights.

Sonian is building the future and solving big data problems for companies, all while managing more than 20 billion objects in the cloud.

• In today’s complex business, legal and regulatory environments, basic email archiving functionality is not enough and may end up costing an organization more than expected.

• Office 365 does include several built-in general-purpose email archiving capabilities and some basic functionality, such as simple eDiscovery and high-level retention capabilities for regulatory compliance. However, for many, these simple capabilities may not be enough.

• How the legal, regulatory and business requirements for email archiving continue to grow and are becoming more complex
• Why the risks and costs associated with inadequate email archiving capability continue to rise
• Which Office 365 search limitations pose additional risks and costs not found with more powerful third-party archiving solutions
• Why Office 365 basic email archiving does not meet the additional eDiscovery and regulatory requirements with which many organizations are faced
• How many third-party solutions meet the most stringent and complex email archiving requirements

Founded in 2007, Sonian is the only pure public cloud information archiving company, providing services that are easy, flexible, actionable and reliable for OEM partners and their end customers. Sonian allows companies to preserve, analyze and access their electronic communications for legal, regulatory and continuity purposes while gaining organizational insights.

Sonian is building the future and solving big data problems for companies, all while managing more than 20 billion objects in the cloud.

Founded in 2007, Sonian is the only pure public cloud information archiving company, providing services that are easy, flexible, actionable and reliable for OEM partners and their end customers. Sonian allows companies to preserve, analyze and access their electronic communications for legal, regulatory and continuity purposes while gaining organizational insights.

Sonian is building the future and solving big data problems for companies, all while managing more than 20 billion objects in the cloud.

What are you doing for archiving? Office 365 is a robust offering with a wide range of capabilities, but archiving is among the limitations of the platform’s native functionality.

Archiving is a necessity (and part of good data governance) for nearly every business, especially those in heavily regulated industries. But at what cost? Archiving is included only with the Office 365’s top-of-the-line Enterprise E3 package. Conversely, five of the six Office 365 packages don’t include archiving at all.

If you have archiving needs and you’re an Office 365 customer, consider adding a third-party solution.

Sonian’s email archive provides added data protection.
With Sonian, every sent and received email message is archived using immutable WORM storage. Data is stored in its original state and is not editable in any way – a stark contrast with Office 365 archiving. Office 365 archived data is editable and changes are tracked via a recoverable items folder. For heavily regulated and litigiously intensive businesses, this just doesn’t fly.

Sonian’s email archive provides superior search capabilities.
Once messages and file attachments are archived, data is easily accessed and retrieved by business users, such as the legal team, without help from IT. Unlike Office 365, Sonian has no limitations on the number of mailboxes per search, the volume of results per search or the number of concurrent searches.

Founded in 2007, Sonian is the only pure public cloud information archiving company, providing services that are easy, flexible, actionable and reliable for OEM partners and their end customers. Sonian allows companies to preserve, analyze and access their electronic communications for legal, regulatory and continuity purposes while gaining organizational insights.

Sonian is building the future and solving big data problems for companies, all while managing more than 20 billion objects in the cloud.

The Pittsburgh-Post Gazette makes the issue crystal clear: “The state has begun exploring ways it might archive emails that routinely are deleted by its 80,000 executive branch employees so those documents would be preserved for litigation and Right to Know reviews…”

According to the article:

• State employees who are encouraged to pare emails from their inboxes decide for themselves which of their emails are public records.
• Deleted emails are backed up on state servers for five days and then are permanently deleted.
• An archiving system would cover 47 agencies under the governor’s jurisdiction.

In fact, government agencies have been in the spotlight because of email quite a bit in recent months.

In June, the Internal Revenue Service was under fire from Congress because it can’t find two years worth of former employee Lois Lerner’s email. That’s a huge problem, considering Congressional investigators have subpoenaed them.
As you may recall, Lerner, the former Director of Tax Exempt Organizations at the IRS, was accused of targeting and delaying the applications of conservative organizations. She refused to testify before Congress, was held in contempt and left her position amid the controversy.

In May, Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki resigned in the wake of his department being accused of deadly delays in health care at some of its hospitals. E-mails allegedly discussing the destruction of a secret list of veterans waiting for care were at the heart of the scandal.

All these stories have a common theme – preserving and searching email data.

Founded in 2007, Sonian is the only pure public cloud information archiving company, providing services that are easy, flexible, actionable and reliable for OEM partners and their end customers. Sonian allows companies to preserve, analyze and access their electronic communications for legal, regulatory and continuity purposes while gaining organizational insights.

Sonian is building the future and solving big data problems for companies, all while managing more than 20 billion objects in the cloud.

The coverage in Tech Dirt doesn’t pull any punches: “New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s office continues to do everything it can to prevent its emails from being accessed by FOIL (Freedom of Information Law) requests.”

The article claims:

Cuomo’s aides are sending emails from private accounts to conduct official business, to skirt FOIL requests

The governor’s office has set its email retention bar incredibly low with an unusually short retention schedule and aggressive deletion policies

The state cites storage limitations as the basis of deletion policies, despite that fact that its version of Microsoft Office 365 includes 50GB of storage per mailbox and unlimited email archiving

In fact, there’s been no shortage of government agencies in the spotlight because of email in recent months.

In June, the Internal Revenue Service was under fire from Congress because it can’t find two years worth of former employee Lois Lerner’s email. That’s a huge problem, considering Congressional investigators have subpoenaed them. As you may recall, Lerner, the former Director of Tax Exempt Organizations at the IRS, was accused of targeting and delaying the applications of conservative organizations. She refused to testify before Congress, was held in contempt and left her position amid the controversy.

In May, Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki resigned in the wake of his department being accused of deadly delays in health care at some of its hospitals. E-mails allegedly discussing the destruction of a secret list of veterans waiting for care were at the heart of the scandal.

The two Washington examples are just the latest in a recent series of incidents:

An engineer convicted of obstruction of justice for deleting messages after an accident…

A pro football team sidelined by accusations of cyber bullying among athletes…

A governor embroiled in a political scandal because of emails sent by his top aides…

All these stories have a common theme – preserving and searching email data.

Founded in 2007, Sonian is the only pure public cloud information archiving company, providing services that are easy, flexible, actionable and reliable for OEM partners and their end customers. Sonian allows companies to preserve, analyze and access their electronic communications for legal, regulatory and continuity purposes while gaining organizational insights.

Sonian is building the future and solving big data problems for companies, all while managing more than 20 billion objects in the cloud.

Here’s the key takeaway: Many Office 365 customers will require third-party products and services to supplement the native capabilities of the platform.

“There is no denying that Microsoft Office 365 is a robust offering with a wide range of capabilities. Microsoft has taken pains to ensure that Office 365 operates with reasonable reliability and that its features and functions meet the needs of a wide range of potential customers. However, as with any mass-market, technology-based offering, there will be deficiencies in specific aspects of the features and function that many customers require. Because no cloud-based offering can be all things to all customers, many – if not most – Office 365 customers will require third-party products and services to supplement the native capabilities of the platform.”

Founded in 2007, Sonian is the only pure public cloud information archiving company, providing services that are easy, flexible, actionable and reliable for OEM partners and their end customers. Sonian allows companies to preserve, analyze and access their electronic communications for legal, regulatory and continuity purposes while gaining organizational insights.

Sonian is building the future and solving big data problems for companies, all while managing more than 20 billion objects in the cloud.